How To Prepare Your Home For An Extended Vacation

In our last blog post, we covered some simple tips for what to do if you’re leaving your house for a short vacation in the winter. However, if you leave your house for a long time in the winter and don’t have someone coming over to house sit, then you should definitely prepare your home adequately for the forces of nature that it will experience while you’re away.

In preparing your home effectively, it’s always better to be safe than sorry. It’s also important to recognize which parts of your home are the most likely to be affected and to make adequate preparation for these areas. For instance, your furniture won’t care if you turn the thermostat down to 40 degrees, but your house plants may not like it at all.

Your home’s plumbing is the most important thing for you to consider, because this is the item that poses the biggest risk to your entire house. If there is a power outage or your furnace breaks, this could cause water to freeze in the pipes and burst them, causing flooding and water damage. Here are some tips from our plumbing and HVAC service in the Kankakee area about what preparations you need to make in your home so that you can avoid this risk.

1. Drain all the pipes.

Many people do a modified version of this by turning off the main water line to the house and then opening all the faucets in the house until they run out of water. This is better than nothing, as it can minimize the amount of water that can flood your house if a pipe does burst. However, this method does not get all the water out of all the pipes, leaving you at risk of a broken pipe or a leak in the places where there’s still water in the pipes. A professional can save you the hassle of this step by draining the pipes properly, blowing out all the water so that there is none remaining. Our plumbers are experienced at performing this task, and having a professional do this minimizes the inconvenience to you so that you can be free to pack and get ready for your trip.

2. Ensure that your furnace is in good working order.

Many people put off furnace maintenance, don’t know how to do it, or simply don’t know why it’s beneficial, and so they live with their fingers crossed, hoping that the furnace will go on working fine. There’s no doubt that having a broken furnace in the winter is a bad thing, but having a broken furnace while you’re away and don’t know about it can be exponentially worse. If you haven’t done so already, call one of our HVAC technicians to give your heating system a look to make sure it’s in good working order and properly maintained before you leave for your trip. Then you can set it to about 40 degrees and leave home knowing that you’ll save money and protect your house.